OLD HOLLISTER PLACE
Location: There are two towns called Fairhope in Alabama. One Fairhope is located in Mobile County on Highway 98 eight miles from Interstate 90 on the coast of Mobile Bay and fifteen miles from Mobile, Alabama. The other Fairhope is a deserted ghost town on Rural Route 13B near Tuscaloosa in Pickens County. The Old Hollister House no longer exists; an empty cornfield five miles north of Route 2 marks the location where it once sat.
Description Of Place: The Old Hollister Mansion was a French renaissance plantation house like most of the antebellum homes of the South on forty acres of land in a remote part of Pickens County. Two stories tall with five bedrooms, external balconies and a cellar, the property included a barn, stables and an old slave quarters on land bordering a creek flowing toward the Sipsey River. In the years after it was deserted, it fell into neglect with the property becoming overgrown by weeds and brush and eventually become overwhelmed by vines.
Ghostly Manifestations: During the American Civil War, it is reckoned over five hundred small towns were destroyed or left in ruins by both Union and Confederate Armies. In the 19th Century, numerous small towns barely had roads and rarely had more structures than a bank, a post office and a church to serve a small plantation of farmers and plantation owners. Once a prominent corn plantation, the Hollister Plantation was left deserted before the Civil War because of reports of something that haunted the old house. Locals described dark shadows that lurked through the place, footsteps from empty rooms and a feeling of being watched. No one liked being near the place after dark. It was just something about being there in the middle of nowhere without signs of other human life that perturbed those who tried to live there.
In 1863, William Hollister was one of numerous Confederate Soldiers who became outlaws against the Union Army and the Federal Government. He had heard of the house from his great uncle, Geoffrey Hollister, who had fallen in battle, and after robbing the Confederate payroll from the Fairhope Bank and killing several people in his escape, he attempted to make his way to Mexico. Unfortunately, one of the members of his gang was injured and he had to make a slight detour to the distant farm he had heard about from his relative. As an unholy omen welcoming them, the band of outlaws were greeted by a scarecrow made from a forgotten corpse.
During the few days they took refuge in the old house, William and his gang were haunted by sights and activity that both seemed to aggravate and terrify them. His brother, Samuel, with the bullet in his shoulder, saw something running in the cornstalks and fired at it. His aim was precise, his bullet on target, but whatever he had fired upon just vanished. It was the start of something odd happening around them.
Corporal Joseph Slater reported he heard children laughing in the upstairs of the house. Gun drawn, he searched the house over, but found no one that could have caused the noise. The whole time he was in the house, he felt he was being watched. The house was still full of furniture, books, toys and personal property, and as he looked upon the faces in the portraits on the walls, he had the weird feeling they were looking back at him.
William had been joined by several friends and confidantes in robbing the bank. Besides Samuel and Joseph, he was accompanied by Annabelle Reeves, his girlfriend, a nurse who had helped to case the bank for the robbery. Todd was a rescued black slave, and per his up-bringing, he was very superstitious. He himself felt something in the house, and after feeling as if he was being followed, he recovered his path and discovered wet footsteps that started in one bedroom and ended in another where they had died out. Terrified, he started spouting the Lord's prayer from his lips, but as his fear mounted, he quickly and suddenly raced from the room and tried escaping the house.
According to the story William later told the authorities, Samuel's shoulder got worse and festered. Despite Annabelle's skills as a nurse, and without antibiotics, Sam died the afternoon after the shooting. After he passed, things in the house seemed to get worse. They all heard the sounds of children at one time or another and while wandering in the dark on the property, Joseph tripped and stumbled head first into the well. Annabelle was terrified by the apparition of an eyeless young boy who ran past her in the house. This specter was seen several more times including by Clyde Carter, another man from William's infantry. This entity vanished into rooms with William chasing after it with a gun and was often followed or surrounded by the sounds of voices whispering. William confesses he was jumping at every noise during this paranormal onslaught and that while shooting at the walls he might have accidentally murdered Annabelle in the dark. At one point, Clyde thought he saw Joseph wandering the house despite the fact that at that pint, he was already dead. Eventually deserting the house and the stolen silver, William Hollister was grabbed in Birmingham a few days later and imprisoned in the former Downey State Prison afterward where he died in 1866.
After his death, the old farmhouse stayed empty and abandoned for several years. Fairhope was also left deserted after the Civil War, many of its denizens having moved to Birmingham, Tuscaloosa and Montgomery during the war to escape getting shot or captured by Union soldiers. In the 1890s, an immigrant named Andrew Keaton up from New Orleans was traveling north to Nashville when he spotted the value of the old Hollister farm and tried to lay claim to it. Like William Hollister, he and his family camped both in and out of the house and barn, and they saw too the shadows in the cornstalk, the ghostly children and the odd apparitions in the windows. They traveled onward after a week, but passed on his experiences to Italian immigrants named Antonio and Carlotta Ferrigno who tried to take over the farm as well. However, being a childless couple, they could not understand the sounds of children laughing and playing upstairs. By now, rumors of the Hollister House's reputation was gaining word of mouth, and while Antonio was in nearby Millport for supplies, he heard about the tales William Hollister had told while living there. Ferrigno and his wife moved to another nearby farm without even knowing if the stolen silver was still on the farm.
One of the men who had heard William Hollister describe his experiences in the house was Lionel Hemsworth, a prison guard, who repeated them to friends and family. His son, Jack Hemsworth, published them in the book, "Ghost Stories Out of the Civil War," but he too in researching William's criminal career also wondered if Union officiers had slipped back and seized the stolen Confederate gold.
On July 23, 1907, Jack was accompanied by a team of three investors who traveled to the town of Fairhope near Mobile and tried to find the farm. Unsuccessful, they returned home to Montgomery. Eight years later while perusing pre-Civil War maps, he found the location of Fairhope in Pickens County and re-accompanied by his previous investors, once again sought out the farm. By now, the house looked even more haunted. Vines were growing through the location and out of walls, the structure was leaning over and the cornstalks growing wide were growing up against the house and slave quarters. In the shaky structure, Jack felt he had been touched by unsolidified beings when no one else was in the room, and one of his partners kept their distance from a particular bedroom that made them feel uneasy, reporting strange incidents within the manor house. One of the most common unexplained occurrences during their stay was the sound of a ringing phone. They searched the antebellum mansion for the sound of the house for it, but never found it. As an odd coincidence, the sounds always started whenever they tried to enter the barn where they believed William would have buried the silver. One of the investors became spooked by the appearance of ghostly children in an upstairs window staring back at him, and another ran from the house after the figure of a woman surprised him after emerging from the main bedroom. Departing the house after unsuccessfully searching for the Confederate gold, Jack was researching the stories transcribed from William Hollister in prison and came across a photo of Nurse Annabelle Reeves. He recognized her as one of the apparitions he had seen in the house.
History: The Hollister Mansion was an 2,500 square foot mansion in what was then rural Pickens County in 1813. It was built by Nathaniel Hollister in the early Nineteenth Century and passed to his son Johnathan Hollister who died without any surving children. His nephew, Jeffrey Hollister, a commander in the 23rd Alabama Calvary during the Civil War, inherited the farm but lost his life in action near Selma in 1862, but not before telling his nephew, William, about the house. Whether he knew about the house's history or not is a matter of debate. William never made it back to the house in his lifetime, and the house was left deserted and abandoned for over forty years. A few families tried taking over the farm through the Twenties and Thirties, but none of them stayed long, and the house remained abandoned much longer than it was occupied. Sometime in the 1950s, the derelict location collapsed to the ground, but by then, all the property around it had been sold. The remains were burned by the nearby Mantua Fire Squad for training exercises in 1979.
Identity of Ghosts: According to local lore passed down in the area, after Johnathan Hollister lost his wife to consumption, which was what tuberculosis was known as in his time, he turned to unholy acts trying to revive her corpse by sacrificing everyone on his farm. He murdered eleven slaves and then both of his sons and his daughter out of grief, burying them in the cellar of the house. Unfortunately, his secret got out and a mob of angry neighbors and vigilantes attacked him in the house, dragging him out and hanging him. A few days later, someone strung his corpse up as a scarecrow and abandoned it. Many believe the ghosts of the children protected by the slaves of the children haunt the house. Others believe Hollister unleashed something much darker and left a stain on the property. In the spot where the house once rested, nothing grows, and the section of field is covered in nothing but dead and dying grass.
Source/Comments: Dead Birds (2004) - Loosely based on Wolfe Manor in Clovis, California, Hickory Hill near Junction, Illinois and on incidents in the movie.
Henry Thomas (William Hollister) also starred as young Norman Bates in the movie, Psycho 4 (1990).
Isaiah Washington (Todd) also starred as Eldon Greer in the movie, Ghost Ship (2002)